For the last year and a half I’ve been reporting into an Autodesk Research team based mainly in Toronto, so it made sense to include that city in the itinerary of our round-the-world tour. This did mean, however, that almost inevitably my wife and kids would be left alone for the majority of our time in the city, while I spent time with colleagues.
I’m part of the Complex Systems Research group, run by Azam Khan. It’s an impressive group – many have PhDs, a few of us do not – so it’s always an education for me to spend time with my team-mates. This time was no exception: on Monday and Tuesday a number of us participated in a “systems summit” where we learned about the work being done in the team around systems modeling and simulation. With particular focus on a core technology known as DEVS, which has been the basis of a number of interesting papers published by the team. I’m very far from being an expert in this field, so it was really interesting to get…